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In collating mid-century design, this book does encourage one question - can you imagine life without it? – Alto Magazine

Photofile Series

The best work of the world’s greatest photographers in an attractive format and at an affordable price. The series was awarded the first annual prize for distinguished photographic books by the International Center of Photography, New York.

Berenice Abbott earned a place as one of the greatest American photographers. Working in Paris, she photographed its literary and artistic leading lights, including James Joyce, but her name was made by her major project, Changing New York, which documented the interaction between the city's dramatic architecture and its people.

Peter Beard was twenty-four years old when he moved to Kenya, where he built up an exceptional body of work. His images of wild animals such as crocodiles and elephants, and of the land in all its purity and its wildness, are a huge collage of his experiences. Together with his photographic journals, they show that Peter Beard is unique among contemporary photographers.

No photographer is more closely associated with a city than Brassaï (1899–1984) with Paris). His most famous portraits and cityscapes, collected in this pocket-size book, form a unique vision of life in pre- and post-war Europe

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) studied painting before taking up photography in his early twenties. One of the founders of the photography agency Magnum (together with Robert Capa and others), he is best known for the consummate skill with which he captured the most fleeting of scenes.

His fascination with this pioneering new medium led him to take intensely atmospheric portraits of family members and friends, and to create a series of haunting, unforgettable – and, to modern eyes, controversial – images

Elliott Erwitt is one of the most remarkable photographers in America today. Sudden coincidences and chance encounters with objects and situations allow him to capture glimpses of the ridiculous or the comical side of everyday events, and his visual jokes become striking and pithy observations about life. Compassionate, humorous, sinister, playful, bitter, bawdy, lyrical – this collection confirms Erwitt’s limitless ability to capture a range of moods and nuances of expression.

Before the beginning of his exile, Koudelka had already produced two works of great importance. One documented the Prague Spring, while the other, on gypsies, could almost have been an ethnological study had its images not been charged with so much emotion. Unknown in 1970, he has risen to become one of the most powerful photographers of the day.

Lartigue (1894-1986) was given his first camera in 1902 and soon began to fill album after album with photographs of family and friends. The photographs collected here – of car and bicycle races, early aeroplanes, enormous kites – radiate the intimacy, humour and exuberance he brought to his art.

Saul Leiter encountered Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists, and discovered street photography and the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. His mastery of colour is displayed in unconventional cityscapes in which reflections, transparency, complex framing and mirroring effects are married to a very personal printing style, creating a unique kind of urban view.

One of the most famous artists of the 20th century, a dadaist and pioneer of Surrealism, Man Ray (1890–1976) became involved with photography in 1914. He was soon experimenting with different processes – solarization, negative images, multiple exposures – and in 1921 he created the 'rayograph' by exposing objects placed on to photosensitive material.